August, 1910.] 



113 



Edible Products. 



Basic Slag and Sulphate of Potash. Iu 

 most of the Tea Companies' reports for 

 last season 4 to 5 cents per pound made 

 tea have been spent in manure and 

 cultivation. That means that manure 

 costs 4-95 and application "05 of a cent. 

 This I do not call cultivation — it means, 

 perhaps, that the manure has been 

 forked in above every tea bush. This is 



A PROFITABLE BUSINESS FOR THE 

 MANURE SELLERS, 



but a very bad thing for the share- 

 holders. Some years ago I read of a 

 Managing Director getting up and telling 

 a Company meeting of shareholders that 

 he did not think it right to apply 

 " forcible " manure to their estate; the 

 fact of the matter was he did not intend 

 to apply any manure ; the price of tea 

 was low, and he was reducing everything 

 except his own fees, but the ptern logic 

 of facts soon taught him that he could 

 not go on year after year taking every- 

 thing from the soil and putting nothing 

 back, for diseases, grey blight, &c, broke 

 out and then he had to manure, and now 

 he has gone to the very opposite ex- 

 treme, and you hear of 840 lbs, to 900 lbs. 

 artificial manure being applied per acre. 

 How much of this large quantity is 

 wasted it is difficult to tell, but I should 

 say that fully half never does the tea 

 bush any good. The farmers in America 

 and the Indian tea planters have found 

 out that ib is more profitable to apply 

 artificial manure in small quantities, and 

 spending more money on cultivation. 

 The practice of clean weeding is, I am 

 convinced, radically wrong, and it means 

 disease and death to tea as it did to 

 coffee iu the old dxys. One of the mem- 

 bers of the Legislative Council said in 

 Council that, in his opinion, it was 

 injudicious manuring that had killed 

 our coffee. I think it was more likely 

 that it was the foolish system of clean 

 weeding, as very few estates got any 

 artificial manure in those days, and 

 those only in the neighbourhood of 

 Railways. In Haputale and Badulla the 

 coffee made the best fight against the 

 disease. The estates on that side had 

 not been cleanly weeded, limed or had 

 artificial manure ; consequently there 

 was more humus in the soil, and they 

 were able to withstand the disease 

 longer, and, had not coffee gone down 

 in price, would have grown coffee till 

 this day. In South India 



COFFEE IS STILL GROWN TO PAY, 



but they dig their weeds in twice a year. 

 On the other hand it was the compar- 

 atively new estates in Dikoya and 

 Dimbula on which coffee first went out ; 

 it was on those estates that clean 

 weeding was systematically carried on. 

 15 



A farmer at home does not collect and 

 burn his weeds— he ploughs in his grass, 

 his stubble, and potato haulm into the 

 ground so as to increase the humus in 

 the ground for without humus you can- 

 not get bacteria, without bacteria a 

 plant cannot obtain soluble food from 

 the soil, and he also knows that without 

 humus, artificial manure will not help 

 him. Without humus in the soil tea 

 will not thrive. Our scientists have 

 told us of a plant that collects nitrogen 

 from the air, Crotalaria. How few 

 planters up-country have planted it ! Is 

 it the fear of weeds, or because the V. A. 

 thinks that artificial manure is better 

 and more profitable to the estate ? I 

 suppose it is too much to expect planters 

 in general, and Visiting Agents in parti- 

 cular, to know anything of agriculture, 

 but it would be a good thing for some 

 of them to 



SPEND A WEEK-END AT THE ROYAL 

 BOTANIC GARDENS, 



Peradeniya, to learn something about 

 what they call weeds. All weeds are 

 not harmful to tea ; some are beneficial 

 and should be encouraged; if they do 

 nothing else they save wash and thus 

 conserve the humus, It takes little 

 sense to see that in heavy rains the 

 water runs clean off a field that has a 

 good coating of grass or weeds, and from 

 a field that has been well cultivated 

 (well-forked), there will be no wash. 

 Does anyone give a thought to the num- 

 ber of coolies that have to tramp a tea 

 field to do the work ? 



Coolies. 



Weeding 3 coolies per acre per 

 month ... ... ... 36 



Pruning 15 coolies per h the estate 

 every 2nd year ..." ... 



Plucking 400 lbs, tea per acre 

 1,600 lbs. leaf per cooly ... 80 



Manuring ... ... ... 12 



Other works ... ... 5 



140 



What is the state of land on most of onr 

 estates after all this tramping ? Very 

 much like a sun dried brick, impervious 

 to air and water. A farmer at home 

 cultivates grass because he is able to do 

 with less manure and grow corn. A 

 farmer uses eleven kinds of seeds to 

 plant up a grass-field— some nitrogen 

 collectors, others deep feeders. I sup- 

 pose I shall be told that you cannot use 

 a plough on a tea estate, but is there 

 any reason against using a boe or a fork ? 

 The hoe was invented a long time before 

 the plough. What I would recommend 

 is to 



